


Prayer for the Living

by thedevilchicken



Category: Priest (2011)
Genre: Blood Drinking, Bloodplay, Canon-Typical Violence, Celibacy, Explicit Sexual Content, First Time, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, M/M, Post-Canon, Religious Guilt, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Shame in Sexual Desires, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-13
Updated: 2017-04-13
Packaged: 2018-10-18 05:57:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10610679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: When he found him after, he was barely alive.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [danaste](https://archiveofourown.org/users/danaste/gifts).



When he found him after, he was barely alive. If you could really call what it was that he was _alive_ , of course, and the priest wasn't completely sure. 

When the storms roll in over the wasteland, they're always bad. They're bone dry and bitter cold and the air gets so full up with sand that it blots out the sun almost completely, thick like the smog over the cities except it'll smother you a hundred times faster. And once you can't even see your hand in front of your face so you couldn't drive another foot even if your engine hadn't already gotten clogged up fast and failed, and you can barely breathe without taking a whole lungful of dust you can't cough out, that's when the lightning starts. If anything, the lightning'll kill you faster than the sand will.

You don't want to get caught in a storm in the wastelands but there he was, skirting the edge of one, chasing a stray, intermittent heat signature that could just as easily have been electrical interference from the storm as any kind of living thing. He should've ridden away and tried again when the storm had died down but he knew that could take days because it often did, and he'd gotten himself stuck in them before. He stopped instead. He did exactly what you're _not_ meant to do at times like that and he walked straight into the storm. He told himself that's just what priests do.

The bulk of the pack on his back and the improvised weights he'd strapped to his ankles meant the whipping gusts of wind couldn't toss him around the way they threatened to. The breathing apparatus and the goggles he'd put on kept the sand mostly out of his eyes and nose and mouth. He tied a strip of cloth over his ears like a bandana and he took one last reading from the bike's map display before he locked it down, bolted it into the ground with its stabilizers that were meant for just such an occasion and left it there where no one in their right mind would try to steal it, at least not until the storm had passed and by then it might be buried. What he read on the display said if he walked east-north-east for a little more than six miles, maybe seven, he'd find whatever that signature out there was, _if_ it was, if it was more than just a mirage brought on by the storm. All he needed was a compass and the grace of God; at the very least, he had a compass. 

The buildings in that part of the wasteland were tall and broken and structurally unsound and everyone knew to keep away from them if they could be sensibly avoided, except he didn't avoid them 'cause that was where the signature had been last time he'd checked. Their massive, fractured superstructures groaned in the howl of the wind like they'd give out at any second and sand poured off their giant windows, surfaces that years of storms just like that had ground down from shiny and transparent to a kind of dull translucence. He went inside, ducking under the frame of a broken window and straight into the second floor. The sand had stacked itself in drifts over the years and swallowed the first floor up entirely. There was no one left out there to care very much about that at all.

He pulled his flashlight from his bag and flicked it on, lighting up a sandswept office full of ancient, broken furniture in all directions. There were tracks in the sand that led inside, half-eroded footprints from before the storm had started but not from _long_ before, points where someone had stumbled, fallen, dragged themselves back up and started on their way again. He pulled his knife from its sheath at his belt and he followed those tracks to the stairwell, pausing there in the doorway in the dark. He thought briefly of the hive at Sola Mira, about vampires and traps and things that he'd lost that perhaps should have stayed that way and perhaps he'd've been happier that way. Then he went down. He told himself he was ready for anything. He wasn't.

He found him in the dark down there, in the atrium where the weight of the sand had broken open the big glass front doors and spilled inside in a long, rolling slope. Maybe once there'd been a shallow pool in there near the half-wrecked reception desk, or a fountain with splashing water, maybe even fish, and he was slumped inside it with his head lolling back on the lip around the low, tiled edge. When the priest shone the flashlight on his face, his eyes blinked open. His skin was burned, but he was clearly slowly healing. He'd never honestly believed he'd died, and it turned out then that he really hadn't. The priest wasn't sure how it felt to be proved right about that. 

"You come all this way in a storm just to find me, priest?" he asked, his voice hoarse like he'd breathed in the fire that'd burned him, too. Perhaps he had, judging by the twisted-up, angry look on his face as he spoke, judging by the fact that he could clearly barely move, though the priest guessed that was likely more from hunger than from injury. It had been three weeks since they'd blown the train outside the city and there was nothing living in that part of the wasteland, hadn't been for years, not since the last of the scavengers had picked the place clean and moved away. He had to be coming close to starving. It was almost a surprise he wasn't dead from it already, but he'd always been stubborn, since the start.

"Honestly, I didn't know it was you in here," the priest replied, honestly. Maybe he'd hoped, maybe he hadn't, but he certainly hadn't _known_.

"And now you do?" He raised his singed brows, though it looked like it cost him to do it, and he pointed with one burned finger of one burned hand of one burned arm that he didn't even manage to raise up off his thigh. His fingers twitched like he'd have liked to have wrapped them around the priest's throat if only he'd had the energy to do it; the issue was he didn't have even close to that level of energy. From the tracks the priest had followed, he'd spent the last of it staggering across the floor above and then half falling down the stairs. "Are you going to use that knife?"

The priest looked down at the knife in his hand. He slid it very slowly, and very deliberately, back into its sheath at his waist. He knew he was being watched; he could almost feel it in the way his skin crawled. He was looking right back at him.

"No," he said. "I didn't come here to kill you." 

"You want information, then." 

He looked at him. He frowned at him. 

"I want nothing from you," he said.

The problem was, after all that time, they both still knew that was a lie. 

\---

When the clergy took them in and made them into priests, they all gave up their old lives because that was the sacrifice that priesthood required. They gave up their homes and their families and their friends and the places that they'd lived and any dreams they'd had, and everything they'd known and seen and done before that moment. They gave up _everything_ , and that included their names. They gave up everything that had ever been normal.

In the clergy's training center, on floodlit church grounds near the walls around Cathedral City, they wore numbers sewn onto their robes for their instructors' ease. They'd pledged to give up their former lives for God and so they had to learn to let those lives go in their entirety; the monsignors told them that their names were a large part of that, a big step on the way, because being nameless would allow them to wipe the slate clean. As an initiate, they called him Nine, but he knew there'd been a Nine before him and there'd be another after he moved on. He learned to let his old self go, for God and for the clergy and for everyone else along with them. The war needed priests and if it meant Shannon and their daughter would be safe, even without him, then he could do that. He could be a priest. 

After his tattoo, when he left the center and entered the priesthood, he was no longer called Nine and his robes had no number sewn onto them, at his chest, over his heart. As a priest, he joined the other nameless few, special and chosen and yet completely interchangeable in terms of function, at least in the eyes of the clergy, and he didn't much mind how anyone addressed him after that. On the road by himself, he was sometimes _Priest_ and sometimes _Father_ ; when they travelled as a group, next to no one ever dared to speak to them and so they were by and large anonymous; alone together, in each other's company, in their priory that was as much their home as anywhere could be, no names were required as their vows allowed no intimacies. They called each other _brother_ , _sister_. The priests were to be weapons, nothing more and nothing less, living pious lives of service and prayer and sacrifice. They had no names and that was how it was to him for years, until it was just as if there'd been nothing else, until nothing else was normal. 

One of his brothers died one day, as many had before him, and a new one came to take his place. He wasn't quite _new_ , maybe, not strictly speaking, just a transfer from another team based in another city, but he was new to them and so they trained for three full weeks in the start to bring him into sync with all the rest before they went back into the field - it was protocol, and protocol was always followed. He was as good as any of them, better than some, quick to anger but so they all were now and then, and they quickly found that the priest and his new brother worked well together. Maybe not the most efficiently they could have, maybe they enjoyed what they did too much for it to be the best the clergy could have wished for, but they worked _well_ nonetheless. _Surprisingly_ well. Soon, he knew it was a better fit between the two of them than it had ever been with any of the others; they knew each other's actions and intentions, knew each other's moves before they made them. Soon, they were a team. Soon, they were inseparable. Of course, no one ever tried to separate them; as far as anyone else was concerned, there was no need.

Where one brother went, so did the other. They trained together daily, just the two of them, for an hour or more before their larger sessions as a group. They ate together side by side in the priory's small refectory, slept on neighboring bunks in the dormitory at night, and when two-man teams were what was required by the clergy, they were sent out of the city to work together. They planned their work in far-flung parish halls and on nervous rectors' dining tables, or sitting cross-legged on the ground under a tarp they strung up between their bikes to keep the heat of the sun out of their eyes and off their faces. They slept side by side in priories and rectories and stretched out on wooden pews in churches, in worn old armchairs in scared villagers' parlors, in stables with horses, out under the stars. They didn't ask each other who they'd been before, because they knew they shouldn't think about the past; they were forbidden to, but sometimes they told stories anyway. No intimacies were permitted by their vows, but he told himself when they talked it was just a kind of healthy camaraderie. It was fraternity. They were brothers in arms, and in God.

Then, when they fought together, when they hunted down vampires and they killed together, when they ended drenched in blood and sweat and straining with exertion, in that moment he felt they truly understood each other. They'd look at each other, their breath still quick, their faces flushed, blood and adrenaline pounding in their veins. They'd look at each other, blades in their hands, and there were times when what he felt was less than pure. It was less than devout. It was hot and dark and fraught and bitterly consuming. In those moments, his brother's eyes on him, it didn't feel like they were brothers at all. In those moments, he couldn't pretend that they weren't intimate.

At night, in bed back in the priory, he turned his back and he closed his eyes and he pretended that he didn't know that he was being watched. He pretended that he didn't hear him in the dark, low enough that only he could hear it, so that meant he couldn't know what he was doing. He pretended it had no effect on him, and they were only colleagues like the others were, and he told himself he didn't think about how it would be if he turned to him or opened his eyes so he could see his brother's face. He told himself he didn't think about going to him, pushing down the sheet just past his waist to watch what he was doing with his hands there underneath it, or slipping shirtless into bed with him, touching him with his mouth and his hands and every inch of the skin he had as they pushed away their clothes. He didn't think about quiet corners of the priory, out of sight, about pushing him back against the walls in the armory, the vestry, in the chapel cloisters between the columns once the daytime lights were out and night had fallen, about his hands on him or their hands on each other. He told himself he didn't think of him at all, except as colleagues, but it wasn't true. He knew he was lying to himself. If this was normal then nothing was normal. Nothing at all.

And maybe they went into the cathedral and they said the right words side by side in the pews at mass together, maybe they said them for months, for _years_ , but the priest kept his prayers for himself. 

He prayed to be freed of the things he wanted. He prayed, and God didn't answer.

\---

He should have killed him and he knew it. At the very least he should have turned around and left him there on the ruined building's floor; he could have gone before he'd known he was there and stayed upstairs until the storm was over, and pretended that he'd never found him. He hauled him up bodily and he dragged him into the nearest office instead, still in his breathing mask and goggles, away from the sand that had started to cling to his burns. The only consolation he had as he did it was it hurt him more than it really needed to. He wasn't gentle, but he didn't ask him to be. He didn't say a word at all.

After that, he left the room and he left him in it, albeit temporarily. He supposed it was a way to try to gain some clarity as he made his way around the rest of the building's sad remains, up to the top of the stairwell that vanished into nothing in the storm raging outside. There was nothing left but half-broken furniture and sand and empty spaces where the windows and floors had been carved away, by war and then by nature. He ate a small meal by a window on the fourteenth floor, the last that remained mostly intact, his food somehow mostly not covered in sand, and later on he slept there, listening to the wind and the lightning and the sand as it showered against the glass. He didn't have the dream that night, and when he woke he didn't think perhaps that was because he'd turned out to be alive after all, if you could call what he was _alive_. 

In the morning, he packed away his goggles and his mask and he went back down the staircase. He went slowly, he strolled, dawdled, spent fifteen minutes leaning against a window just to feel the vibrations from the wind and sand outside, wandered in the sandy atrium and tried not to think of his childhood, how he'd built castles with his brother, his real brother, the one he hadn't seen in eighteen years before the day he'd died. Then he walked back into the office where he'd left him and he turned on his emergency lantern. The light was harsh and it cast awkward shadows and there he was, precisely where he'd left him, sprawled on his back on the floor. He opened his eyes. He was still alive, if you could call that living, and he supposed he grudgingly had to. What he was repulsed him, or it should have, but he was coming to believe that _alive_ was the only certainty he could ascribe to him. 

His brother's clothes were scorched and tattered and so once he'd hauled him up again and laid him on the desk, he stripped him out of them piece by piece. He did it slowly, methodically, gave him a wooden cross from his bag to bite down on and he did so with a glare, baring his fangs as if that could be intimidating when he was in the condition he was in. He stripped him naked, touching as if trying not to touch, and then he cleaned the final stubborn scraps of charred clothing and sand from his skin with a cloth he'd doused in alcohol that made him curse around the cross between his teeth and hold so tight at the edges of the desk he'd been laid out on that they splintered and broke in his grasp, even weak as he was, from the pain. He laughed darkly. The priest didn't find it particularly funny as he tweezed broken wood from his limp hands, but it made it simpler to ignore the old, familiar scars on his bare, familiar skin. It made it easier to ignore the fact he still knew every inch of him.

He dressed his wounds and then he dressed him after that. He put him into spare clothes that he pulled out of his pack, pushing him and pulling him and keeping well back from his teeth until the robes were all settled like clothing on a doll, and he looked almost exactly the same as he had before that day at Sola Mira, if you ignored the bandages and burns and the strange new tint that he had to his eyes. He helped him off the desk onto the cracked old leather couch across the room, with his feet propped up on a nearby chair and his head resting back against the leather, and when his brother closed his eyes, then he really looked the same as he had before; it was the color of his eyes that made the difference, perhaps even more than the length of his teeth. The clergy said vampires had no soul because they had no eyes, but he had eyes, even though they'd been changed. Perhaps, the priest thought, that meant his soul was still inside him. It was something to pray for, at least.

He sat down next to him, at a sensible distance should such a thing have been, and the old leather creaked. His brother turned his head to look at him. His eyes opened.

"This reminds me of another time," he said. "We got ourselves caught in a sandstorm then, too. Do you remember?"

He remembered. He wished he could say he didn't.

\---

They were on their way to Outpost 23 when the storm struck up. 

It came so suddenly that they couldn't outrun it. All they could do was pull into the line of towering rocks ahead, abandon their bikes with their sand-clogged engines and hunt out a cave for shelter; what they found was bigger than they'd dared expect, the roof low enough that they both had to stoop but wide enough that they could have been a team of five or six and still fit comfortably inside it. Once they'd nailed a thick, oiled tarp up over the narrow entranceway and flicked the switch on their emergency lantern to light the place up inside, the priest realized it wasn't even close to the worst place they'd even been. It wasn't even the worst place they'd been trapped by a storm; that was the hive out west past Fortunato, five of them against sixty or more vampires, right through the night till dawn. He still remembered that, because he wasn't likely to forget. He still wondered how many times they'd saved each other's lives that night.

They set down their packs and they sat themselves down on the dusty rock floor, their backs to a boulder with edges that years of winds had sanded smooth. It was cold in there and they drew their cloaks in tighter round their shoulders, moved a little closer to each other, the lantern light two shades too stark and two fractions too bright to do much except lose the cross on his brother's forehead in shadow when he turned to look at him in profile. Then he turned back to the light and there was the cross again, where it had always been, for years, till its outline had begun to fade. 

"What was your number when you trained?" his brother asked. 

"Nine," he replied, without hesitation, and he didn't think to ask why he'd asked. He had no reason to question it. 

"I was Twelve," his brother said. "Before that, my name was Jude." 

"I--"

"I'm not asking you to tell me yours." 

"I don't understand."

"I have questions," his brother said. His gaze flickered in the priest's direction just for a second before he glanced away again, back at the walls. "I have doubts."

"Have you confessed?"

He nodded faintly. "Yes. More than once." 

"Then why tell me?"

"Don't you have them, too?"

The priest frowned, looking at him sidelong just for a moment. He saw him in profile in the strange light before he looked away again, with apprehension coiled inside him disconcertingly. 

"I don't," he said, and his brother chuckled lowly. He moved. He came closer, he came up to his knees and he sat back on his heels there on the ground beside him. His hand came up to the priest's jaw, to his cheek to turn his face toward him, the pad of his thumb brushing one cheekbone, the orbit of one eye. The pad of his thumb brushed the priest's bottom lip as he looked him in the eye, too close, so close that his vision was entirely taken up with him and nothing else at all. Of course, that had been how it had been for years; for years, he'd seen nothing but him. The vampires didn't make him nervous anymore, but this did.

"You have doubts," his brother said, and it wasn't a question. 

"I--"

"We have the same doubts, brother."

"That's..." His chest felt tight. He felt sick, claustrophobic, he felt trapped, and he would at least have liked to blame it on the storm outside or the cave they were in but he knew that wasn't true. He closed his eyes, and his brother rested his forehead down heavily against his, shifting till they were pressed there almost cross to cross. They'd never touched, not like that. He hated how it thrilled him.

"I made a vow," the priest said, his throat tight.

"I know you did," his brother replied. "God knows you did. And don't you think God knows you want to break it, too?"

The sound he made wasn't pretty. It wasn't pleasant. It wasn't a sob, not a shout, something strained and raw and awful that lay between the two and echoed dully off the cave's uneven walls before it was swallowed up by the howl of the wind outside. His hands closing to fists in the front of his brother’s robes was not a conscious decision he made and when they kissed, it was hesitant and it was brief, a hot press of mouth to mouth before it was over almost as soon as it had started. His brother - Jude - moved away again after it. They sat apart, but he could still feel his mouth on his.

He wished he could have said that kiss felt chaste, but he knew it wasn't. It hadn't felt chaste at all.

\---

Later, hours of silence on the cracked old couch later, when he took the flask from his bag, once he'd taken a mouthful of water, he offered it to him. One eye cracked open and he raised his brows. 

"That's not what I drink now," he said, in that same broken voice, or maybe it was worse by then because maybe he was dying bit by bit, or maybe _maybe_ wasn't quite the word for it. "Don't let's pretend you don't know that."

He nodded tersely. He understood. What he had to do was very clear, but that wasn't to say it made the doing of it any easier.

He prepared thoroughly. He took off his cloak and his robe and he settled them over the back of a rusted, dusty desk chair. He stripped to the waist with his back turned to him and then slowly he unravelled the wraps from around his hands. He swabbed his wrist with alcohol. He cleaned the blade of his knife with the alcohol too, and, out of view, he pressed the tip against his wrist. He opened a vein with a bright flash of pain - he knew exactly which of them to choose - and he bled himself into a small tin cup. It was left over from the priory, one of the very last things he had from there, so perhaps once upon a time they'd both drunk from it before.

"Are you doing what I think you're doing?" his brother asked, but he didn't reply. He just watched his own blood drain into the cup that he was holding, slowly, the cut not deep so it took time and took coaxing and took a second nick with his knife, a parallel incision; he managed perhaps two thirds of a pint before he turned to his brother with the cup in his hands and his heart in his throat. He went closer. He sat himself back down beside him and because he knew his brother was too weak to lift his hand, let alone the cup along with it, he slipped one hand to the back of his head to ease it up and he held the rim of the cup up to his lips. 

He drank. His brother watched him as he drank, almost self-consciously, almost suspiciously, the priest's blood on his lips and in his mouth and smeared across his teeth as he started healing faster right there in front of him. His cheeks flushed. His breath quickened. And when the cup was empty, when the priest shifted it away and set it on the floor beside the couch, one last drop or two escaped down his chin. The priest caught it with his thumb, wiped it from his skin, pressed his thumb to his brother's mouth before he could think not to do it and he sucked the blood away, his pupils wide. He looked hungry. He looked dangerous, but he'd always been dangerous.

The priest pulled back, and told himself he was disgusted and not excited by it because he couldn't be. When he moved to stand, his brother caught his arm, not strong, at least not yet, but stronger. He knew why he'd done it: was still bleeding, a trail of blood on his skin from his wrist to the crook of his arm. He hadn't dressed the wound. He should have known better. It was such an obvious temptation, such an obvious invitation.

"Don't tease me, priest," he said, his grip tightening a fraction at his forearm, tight enough to bruise if not to break. His thumb slipped in the blood and he leaned in, sniffed, ran the tip of his tongue from the crook of the priest's bare arm almost to the cuts there in his wrist, but not quite. Not quite, perhaps because he'd've been tempted to bite and if he'd bitten, the priest would have been infected just like any other familiar. He pulled back.

"That's not my intention," the priest replied. 

"Then what do you intend?" 

"I don't intend you to die."

"Then what _do_ you intend?"

His brother stood. The priest stood with him, coming up to his full height in front of him though his arm was still gripped tight. His face in the light of the emergency lantern was just the same as it had been all those years before. 

"The queen's blood made you forget," the priest said. "Maybe mine can make you remember." 

\---

The storm died down outside the cave and in the morning, they unearthed their bikes and blasted out the sand-filled engine vents and left. They had a job to do at Outpost 23. 

After the vampires were inevitably dead, they looked at each other in the half-light of dusk there on the horizon and the priest would have prayed all night if he'd thought it would have emptied him of the tangled knot of things he wanted. The church said those things were wrong and he believed that, but couldn't even make himself confess it. He'd tried once, almost a year after they'd met, years ago by then, but he'd been barely even able to form the words inside his head, let alone speak them to the monsignor.

He turned away and he put on his goggles; they left the derelict farm where the vampires had been hiding and they rode on into the nearest town. It was a nowhere kind of place three days on past Jericho with a sheriff who frowned at them as they made their way past the bar to the rectory, on the main street just by the dirt path that led to the church. Even then, folks could be suspicious of priests. He supposed not much ever changed in that respect. 

"We can sleep in the church," his brother told the rector, standing at his door, when the man looked dismayed to see them. The priest supposed he understood; they were both still bloody from the things they'd done and besides that, they were _priests_. "Or stables, if you have them."

"Church'll be fine," the rector said, looking a whole lot like it wasn't but that he couldn't think of any reason at all that was good enough for him to turn them away. 

So, they trudged down the path to the little stone church in their bloody, dirty robes and the rector brought them up two gallon bottles of clean water from the well. They had to dig deep for water in the wastelands and the priest thanked him sincerely but then again, even in the wastelands, the church had more of anything than anyone; the church and the rectory were the two best-kept buildings in the town, even better than the rowdy, crowded bar outside of which the sheriff had been lurking.

They crossed themselves in the aisle and made their way into the sacristy by candlelight. They poured water into two old tin bowls and they stripped to the waist, they soaked cloths, they rubbed them with soap. His brother washed him, rubbed the blood from his face and scrubbed it from his hands and stepped behind him, ran the cloth the length of his spine, between his shoulderblades, over the nape of his neck. When he squeezed the cloth, bloody, soapy water ran down his back and they stopped to unbuckle their boots, to strip off the rest of their dirty clothes, dirty from the ride and from the vampires' blood, though he wished he could have stopped. He wished he could have stopped but ritual demanded it. 

What ritual didn't demand was his brother's bare hands on him. He abandoned the cloth on the table and ran his wet hands over the priest's damp hips. He pressed his mouth between the priest's damp shoulderblades, hesitant but somehow firm. He wrapped his arms around his waist as he pressed up naked to his back. The priest shivered. He pulled away, he jerked away abruptly, though that was the last thing in the world he wanted to do, and the only thing. He resolved to pretend it hadn't happened at all; he didn't get far. He was already on the edge.

He took a cloth and he soaked it methodically, his gaze carefully averted. Then he washed his brother's chest. He washed his collarbones, his neck, wiped flecks of dried blood from his face. He washed his arms, raised them up over his head and washed his sides, over his ribs, knelt on the hard stone floor and washed his thighs, his calves, his feet. It had never felt like it did with this brother with any of the others and when he looked up at him from his knees in the warm flicker of the candlelight, when he looked up over bruised, scarred skin, his brother ran his damp fingers over the priest's short hair and smiled a faint, faintly rueful smile. He washed between his legs then, clenching his jaw. He ran the cloth over his brother's perineum, scrotum, wet the cloth again then eased back his foreskin and ran it lightly over the head of his thick cock. The shaft of his brother's member was hard and heavy in his hands and as his own began to harden, too, he went back abruptly to his feet so he could maybe, maybe, hide what this had done to him. He stepped behind him, cloth in hand, the better to conceal his shame, from his brother if not from himself.

He washed his back. He washed the nape of his neck and the line of his spine and he followed the curve of his buttocks, ran the cloth between them, and oh God, oh _God_ , he was hard by then, entirely, and his brother leaned down against the table. He touched him, because he couldn't fathom what else he was meant to do. He dropped the cloth to the floor and he put his hands on his back because he couldn't not, he ran his fingers down, slowly, feeling his own chest tighten, feeling his own cock jump hard. He ran his thumbs down between his brother's cheeks, he parted them, he rubbed at the hole there between them with the pad of one thumb and his brother leaned down lower, stifling a groan against the crook of his arm. 

"How long has it been for you?" his brother asked, with a quick glance over his shoulder. "The priesthood. Celibacy." 

"Eight years," he replied, stiffly, his voice thick. "Maybe more. I don't know. I don't remember." 

"Twelve," his brother replied, half breathless, and he turned away again, pressing his forehead down to the table. He'd always known he'd been young when they'd taken him, younger than he had, but there it was; this was the first time for him in twelve years. The only time, because he'd given himself to God and now he was giving himself to him. "Twelve years for me. Do it. I want you to do it." 

They shouldn't have used the oils from the sacristy, but then again they shouldn't have used the sacristy at all, not for this. When the priest rubbed oil from a bottle over the length of his own cock, he almost felt sick with his self-loathing at the thrill of it, how wrong it was, how utterly forbidden, how utterly proscribed by every kind of canon law. When he rubbed oil between his brother's cheeks, against his hole, he hated himself for it. He guided the head of his slick cock against him, rubbed it against him with one hand, could barely stand to look at the things he was doing as he pushed himself inside him in ugly, halting fits and starts except he couldn't look away. His brother didn't seem to mind his hesitancy. He didn't seem to mind his lack of ease. He just took a long, unsteady breath and sighed it out against the tabletop as he relaxed around the tip of his cock, and he let him push in deeper till there was no deeper left to go. He let him have him wholly and completely, gave himself the way he'd never been given to God. 

When he rocked his hips and moved inside him, his brother groaned out loud and the priest felt sickly giddy with it. He did it again, again, held his hips in his hands and pushed into him, braced his hands at the edge of the table and pushed into him, harder, Oh God, _harder_ , years of denial spilling over into this. His brother pushed back against him, met him, skin on skin, faster, harder, rougher, hotter, and when he shuddered and tightened and came over his own hand, the priest bucked and groaned and came inside him, too. It was so perfect for all its sweat and blood and grime that it was agony. He'd damned himself, he'd damned them both, but for a second he felt it was worth it. Perhaps that was the worst part of it all; he felt like it was worth it.

He clenched his jaw. He pulled back. He pulled out. He wiped himself off and he dressed himself in clean new clothes and he sank into a chair and dropped his head into his hands, still reeling from this thing he'd done that he'd wanted almost since the day they'd met and told himself he hadn't. He'd never had a man before. What he'd had was Shannon, but he hadn't been able to have her for long before the clergy had come for him and he knew, with awful immediacy, he _knew_ if he could break his vow for this then he could have broken it to be with Shannon and their daughter all those years ago. The clergy had persuaded him that his marriage had been voided by some principal of canon law he'd never even heard of and now he knew he couldn't go back to that, not with all the things he'd done and this new man that he'd become. He knew he couldn't go back and be who he'd been before, but it all still hurt. 

His brother, shirtless, barefoot on the stone floor, eased him out of the chair onto the bedroll he'd rolled out there for the two of them. He blew out the candle and he stretched out against the priest's clothed back. He held him, and he let him do it. 

He'd broken his vow; all that he could do now was repent, or fall down further. He fell.

\---

"I don't know what you mean," his brother said, but he looked like he did know. He looked like he knew it and was fighting it.

"You fell." The priest unflexed his hands, unformed his fists, turned out his empty palms because he wouldn't fight him. "At Sola Mira. You fell."

"You let go."

"They pulled you away. You _fell_."

"You _let go_."

"That's the lie she told you," the priest said. "How many times did she say it until it was true to you? Did you ever question it? How long were you there?"

The priest reached up with his free hand; he hesitated, just a second, before he put it to his brother's cheek. He ran his thumb down over his lips, from the indent above them to his chin below. His brother pulled back so abruptly it was almost like he'd been burned a second time. 

"I don't believe you."

"How long?" he repeated. "What did they do to you?"

"I don't believe you, priest."

"How long was it, Jude?"

He glared. He fucking _glowered_. 

"Don't say that name." He took him by the throat and he squeezed tight. "Don't _say that name_."

"I've said it before."

Jude pushed him back against the wall. He pressed him there, at arm's length, that twisted-up look on his face, his teeth bared. The priest let him. 

"You never did."

"I did. Once."

"You're lying." 

"I'm not."

Jude kissed him. He pushed him up to the wall and he kissed him, angrily, roughly, fangs and all, and the priest didn't try to stop him. He tasted bloody, he tasted of _his_ blood, and when he dropped his mouth to the side of the priest's neck, he was half convinced he'd bite, half convinced he'd drink, and there'd be nothing left of him by the time the storm had finally died down outside. He grazed him with his teeth but didn't break the skin and then there was a hand between his thighs, pressing almost too hard, almost hard enough that it took the pleasure out of it. Almost, but not quite. It was still thrilling. It should have sickened him. He told himself it should have turned his stomach, but it didn't. He wished it had.

He should have pushed him away. He could have - the blood had acted quickly but he clearly needed more to bring him back to his full strength - but instead he let him push and pull and turn him around to face the wall. He let him push him face-first up to it, one arm barred between his shoulderblades and the other raking down the length of his bare spine. He let him pull at the waist of his pants, push them down over his hips so his skin was exposed from neck to thigh. He stayed still while Jude rearranged his own borrowed clothes to rest his hard cock against the small of his back. He let him grind against him. And when he pulled away to take the vial of oil up from the table, when he slicked his cock and rubbed the length of it between his cheeks, the priest pressed his forehead down against the wall and let him do that, too. 

"How long's it been for you?" Jude asked, murmuring, his low voice by his ear making him shiver right down to the bone. The tip of his cock nudged against him. Just the tip pushed inside. 

"Eight years," he said, no hesitation to it because this time he knew exactly. 

"Eight years for me, too," Jude said, as he sank in deeper by slow fractions, though the priest had to think that those eight years were related more to his company during that time than to his dedication to his vows. His free hand trailed up over the priests taut abdomen, over his chest, and pressed in tight against his throat. "Six of them underground. With them. The transformation...wasn't easy. It wasn't quick."

"Do you remember?" 

"Remember what?"

"That day at Sola Mira."

He paused. He brought his free hand up to the wall by the priest's elbow, fingertips pressing hard against it, turning white with it.

"You let go," he said.

"You fell." He shook his head, forehead still pressed to the wall, his eyes squeezed shut with that image in his head again, the look on his face as he vanished back into the dark right there, just like it always was. "I'd have fallen with you before I let go. The others had to keep me from following. For a long time, I hated them for that."

"Liar." 

In an instant, the priest pushed him back. He pushed him out. He turned, he wheeled, and he hit him, his fist striking hard against his jaw. In his weakened state, Jude reeled, he tripped, and the priest reached out and caught his hand. 

"You fell," he said, simply, hotly, and then he eased him to the ground. He went down with him, straddling his thighs, pressing him down hard with his hands spread wide over his chest. He pushed his own pants down more, as far as he could manage, down to the tops of his boots where they gathered; he shuffled, and he spread his knees out wide. He took Jude's cock in one hand and he sat back, he shifted, he clenched his jaw, he bared his teeth. Then he sank down on the length of him, felt himself squeeze tight around him, did it fast, pretty much _too_ fast, the toes of his already worn boots scuffing more against the floor. He flexed his hips, ground down against him, made Jude bite down at his bottom lip and his arms splay wide as his own cock stiffened. Then he reached for his knife on the top of the table nearby. He cut his wrist a third time and he smeared the blood from it straight across Jude's mouth, bloody skin to skin. 

"They took you three days after we agreed to leave together," he said. "When the war was over."

Jude rubbed his bloody face, staining his hand, smudging red-pink against his chin and his jaw and his neck. He licked his lips, blood on his teeth. Slowly, his eyes went wide. Slowly, he realized. That was the only thing that look could mean.

"Do you remember?" the priest asked, bleeding down his wrist, into Jude's borrowed robes. 

"Yes," his brother replied. " _Yes_."

\---

After that night in the church, after everything, after the things that had happened that he couldn't bear to name, he slept soundly. He didn't dream. He'd expected the opposite and the peaceful night was honestly almost worse to him. It was a peace he felt he didn't deserve.

In the morning, Jude gave him his hand and he helped him to his feet. They didn't speak, but they'd never needed to before so speaking should have seemed almost redundant, except it didn't feel redundant. It felt like what they'd done hung between them, as they ate their small breakfast at the rector's kitchen table tucked neatly out of the townsfolk's sight, as they stowed their few belongings and returned to their bikes to return to the city. There was a strain between them that there'd never been before, not even on the day they'd met. It was worse than their restraint had been. He guessed the punishment of it was very much deserved.

They slept that night in a farmer's old barn, watching the stars through the holes in the roof; in the morning, they helped the farmer patch the holes in thanks, and they barely spoke at all. 

They slept the next night on a young widow's porch, watching the stars from under the edge of a sagging old tarpaulin awning; they killed three coyotes who'd been stealing her chickens, figuring that was the least they could do, but they still barely spoke.

They came into Jericho the next night, sore and tired and dusty from the ride, and they paid for a night in a room over the bar that only had one bed but that was fine because everyone knew you could put four priests in a room that size, maybe even five, and they'd make do with what they had. They ate in the bar downstairs, in a corner in the dimmest light so their robes and their tattoos weren't quite so obvious, but people still saw, and they still stared. A drunk called them freaks and told them their kind wasn't wanted there, said priests were nothing but trouble, might as well be a goddamn vampire beacon, and they turned the other cheek because that was what they'd been taught to do. But when they went upstairs, behind closed doors, Jude was all fire. 

"It's men like that that make me wish I'd refused when the clergy came calling," he said, pacing, actually _pacing_ behind the door. He pulled off his cloak, screwed it into a ball and tossed it onto the end of the bed. 

"You don't wish you'd refused," the priest said. He picked up Jude's cloak and he folded it; he set it down on the small table underneath the window alongside his own and then sat himself down on the edge of the bed to work on loosening the buckles of his boots. 

"I don't?"

"No," he said, firmly but somehow almost fondly. "Nobody refuses. And if they asked you again right this second, you'd still say yes."

Jude slumped back suddenly against the door. He let his head drop back heavily, with a bump against the rather aged, worn wood, and he looked like he wanted to deny it, like he was thinking of ways he could deny it, trying to form the words to make it sound right outside his head and maybe inside it, too. He frowned. He almost scowled. 

"Yeah, but I'd think about it real hard first," he said instead. 

The priest's mouth twitched in something almost like a smile and Jude raised his brows, running his hands over his close-shorn hair. The way his neck was exposed as his head tilted back, the way his limbs shifted in his robes, all the priest could think was he knew what his body looked like underneath them. All he could think was he'd touched him, that he'd had him, that he'd been inside him. He could feel his face flush with it and when Jude looked at him, he felt utterly transparent, like his thoughts were plain as the tattoo on his face.

"Don't think you're the only reason I stay," Jude said, but the sting had already gone out of his voice by then. By then, he was almost teasing. And there were things he could've said in response, but the priest let it go.

Jude unwrapped his belt from around his waist, much more carefully than he'd removed his cloak, then he went to the table and he set it down. He put one foot up on the chair to unbuckle one boot then the other, then he pulled off his robe, then went to the bed without another word, but the strain between them seemed less then somehow. They lay down together, half undressed and half not, and Jude put out the light and the priest realized there'd never been any sort of question that they'd share the bed, even after all that had happened, even though the mattress was small enough that they were pressed there shoulder to shoulder under the scratchy old wool blanket. 

Jude turned onto his side, turned away from him, and there was an indecisive moment after that when the priest wasn't sure what he was going to do next, where he paused and he thought too damn much before he turned to him. He shifted up behind him, slung one arm around his waist, pressed his chest to his back, and Jude didn't stop him. He just wrapped the fingers of one hand around his wrist, and they went to sleep. The priest guessed he'd fallen down a little lower, but it turned out he didn't mind the fall.

When the alarm went up later that night, the two priests woke. There was a reason most folks had retreated to the cities down the years till the towns outside were left with just the stubbornest of holdouts and the people who had no other choice but to travel and hadn't the finances for the train; those places weren't fortified the way the cities were and their protection was for the most part just a handful of floodlights and barbed wire, an alarm loud enough to wake the dead and sentries with guns who mostly couldn't've hit the broad side of a barn in broad daylight, let alone a vampire moving at speed at night. So they pulled on their boots and their cloaks and they went out into the street, shouldered past the men with guns who all looked a whole lot like they didn't want to have to use them except for birds and the odd coyote, and they went in the direction they were pointed. 

When the three vampires scaled Jericho's low wall, much too low to be any kind of an effective cover, they met two waiting priests. The vampires didn't last long, but if the priests hadn't been there, who knew what might've happened to Jericho. Some of the townsfolk thanked them as they made their way back up the street, would've shaken them by the hand if they weren't all half scared to death of priests almost as much as they were vampires. Some of them cursed and spat in the dirt and said the vampires wouldn't've come if they hadn't been there. They'd heard it all before. It always seemed like there was nothing like a middle ground; they were heroes or villains, and nothing in between. The priest would've said they were men, just like anyone, just with a vow and a different set of skills to most. 

"They would still have come," Jude said, coming to a halt still spoiling for a fight because that was how it always was for them, after. It took time for a priest to come back down after a fight and Jude had never been real good at reining in his temper. He'd always been passionate, and maybe a little reckless. It was why they worked so well together. "While there are people living here, they'll come." 

"But not tonight, at least," he priest added, and he pressed one hand to the small of Jude's back to prompt him to move along. He did, with a hot-tempered, riled-up glance in his direction, and the priest knew he could see the same thing in him because he could see it reflected in his eyes. The only difference was he struggled with it. The only difference was he tried to tamp it down, and sometimes he succeeded.

The first thing they should've done inside the room was wash, because that was what the ritual called for after killing vampires, to make themselves clean. But behind the closed door, Jude kissed him, his blunt, bloodied fingernails against his scalp, his body pressed up hard against him. In that moment, it almost didn't feel wrong to push the cloak from Jude's shoulders, to fumble at his belt till it was unravelled on the floor, to undress him in the fastest, most improper way he could've done like some travesty of a sacrament. Jude bit at the priest's bare collarbones and made him hiss, made him shove him away, strike out at him till they were almost fighting but then mostly not, not in any way that was recognizable, yanking at each other's boots, stripping each other naked in the flickering light of a borrowed oil lamp. 

Jude pushed him down on the bed and then followed him. He stretched out over him and he kissed the priest's neck, got one hand around his cock and stroked him roughly; he clamped his free hand over the priest's mouth and the priest spread his legs, let him settle between them, pulled up his knees with feet flat to the bed to cradle Jude's hips between his thighs. He had his arms around Jude's waist, hands pressed flat to his back, but he slid them down, almost cautiously but not quite, not totally, nails raking over the small of his back and the curve of his backside. He pulled him closer, tighter against him, and Jude groaned against his neck, low and raw and ragged, almost shaking with it. The priest couldn't say he felt much different. It was ardor in all the ways they'd been told they couldn't have. It was anticipation. 

They used the oil again. They had some with them, for their rituals, sweet-smelling and thick, and Jude pulled back from him only long enough to find it in his things across the room. He slicked himself as the priest pushed himself up on his elbows to watch, red-faced, ashamed, but he couldn't look away. Jude eased one of the priest's knees up, hitched it over his own shoulder and he ran his slick fingers down, between his cheeks, against his hole, too drunk with it to be tentative at all. The priest's cock filled harder and he held on tight to the bars in the headboard there above his head, watched as Jude leaned down, felt it as he rubbed the head of his cock against him bluntly. He took a shaky breath as Jude pushed forward, as he pushed against him. He let that breath out slowly as he penetrated him. 

It smarted, but he didn't care. He let out another breath in a sudden shudder and Jude was in him in just a few unsteady hitches of his hips, leaning over him, propped up on his hands, the priest's knee still over his shoulder. The position should've felt awkward but they did things on a daily basis that no human body had ever really been meant for; he just cinched his other leg around Jude's waist and brought him deeper, pulled on the headboard till it creaked as he pulled his hips up higher, changed the angle, got an extra quarter-inch of Jude's cock shoved up inside him with a gasp. And all he could think was what the others would say, what the monsignors would say, _to go against the church is to go against God_ , fornication, _sodomy_ , it was wrong, oh God, it was wrong, but he just didn't care. He'd have signed away his soul for this. Perhaps he had already.

Jude kissed him. The priest got one hand to the back of Jude's neck and he kissed him back, he crushed their mouths together as Jude moved in him, as he pushed against him. He could feel himself pulling tight around him; he felt huge in him, electric, made his breath hitch and his muscles strain. He couldn't have stopped if he'd wanted to, but he didn't want to. He wanted it to last all night, but it was over far too soon. 

When he came, his back arched hard and the bar in the headboard he was grasping snapped in two right there in his hand. He came over Jude's fist between the two of them and Jude groaned, Jude's hips bucked and he felt his cock pulse inside him as he came, too, in erratic jerks, in thrusts of his hips that hit a place in the priest that made him shudder and his cock give one last kick. And after, once he'd gotten his knee down from over Jude's shoulder and wrapped his legs loosely around his waist instead, cinched together at the ankle, Jude still in him, still hard but softening slowly, they just looked at each other, eyes on each other, flushed and sweaty and breathing hard. The priest didn't know what to say. Jude just smiled faintly, almost wistful, maybe just a little rueful. 

"You're gonna say this was a mistake," he said. 

The priest's mouth twisted wryly. "No, I'm not," he replied, and he lifted his hands to cup Jude's jaw. The headboard had bitten into his palm and blood from it smudged across Jude's cheek, accidentally but somehow that was fascinating to him, the way it feathered in the lines in his skin and caught on the four-, five-day growth of stubble at his chin. Jude turned his head, nuzzled at his bloody palm with a dark little chuckle, shifted his weight to one arm and dabbed his thumb against the cut. All the priest could do was stare as Jude ran it over the tattoo on his own forehead, a messy smear of red over the ochre cross, and that seemed worse somehow than anything else they'd done together, more profane, more damning. When they kissed, he had the bright tang of iron on his lips. The sacrilege of it just made it all the brighter.

The affair went on when they left Jericho. It was furtive and sometimes hard and sometimes joyless, angry, full of shame. It was sometimes shivering against each other as they pressed against a chapel wall, sometimes a bed in a room over a bar three days past nowhere, a deserted outpost, an empty freight car on a train. Jude put his mouth on him as the train rocked side to side, made him dizzy with pleasure and motion or the mixture of the two. They made love on their knees on a bedroll in the desert, Jude's back pressed up tight to his chest, his body hot and tight around him. He couldn't bear to call him his brother anymore; they were lovers then, instead. 

Sometimes it was hard and fast and rough and painful, a desperate thing once they were done with a fight and he could understand that - killing came to him just as natural as breathing, and so did that moment after it was done that he'd always been taught to bury under prayer. He knew there couldn't be one of those things without the other, that he would have no gift without that price he paid for it, but when there was no fight, those other times when his fingers faltered as he opened Jude's shirt, as he pressed his mouth to Jude's scarred chest, when it was slow and hot and breathless, gasping, when they took their time, he took it harder. It was everything he'd vowed he'd never have, for so many different reasons. He learned Jude's body from head to toe in those times; he knew it as well as any one of his prayers.

A month became six became nine became a year. He stopped praying for it to end and started praying that it never would. 

"When this is finished, I'm leaving," Jude said, as they sat apart from the others one day in the priory, as the ash fell like snow outside the windows. They were sharpening their knives and Jude didn't look up for a second as he spoke; the priest slipped with his whetstone, sliced his palm, and then Jude did look up. He looked at his bleeding palm, watched as he made a fist and drops dripped down onto the worn old tabletop. When he took him by the wrist, that was more intimacy than they'd ever shown before in public. And when they moved away, went to the medical bay and Jude cleaned the cut and stitched it closed, the priest watched his face and the careful concentration on it that was layered over something tenser, more conflicted. He was waiting for a response, or at least a reaction, or perhaps he'd thought the slip of the knife was both.

"I'll go with you," the priest said, blurting it out before he knew he'd meant to say it, before he'd even known he'd thought it, but when he thought it through he knew it was exactly what he meant. He put his hand on Jude's arm and said _Jude_ like that meant something, and Jude looked at him with the needle and thread still in his hand, still in the priest's palm. He didn't say a word. He just smiled, and he went back to sewing. 

Three days later, he fell at Sola Mira. Three days later, the priest believed he'd died. He believed it was their punishment.

\---

"I remember," Jude said, sprawled there on the floor. He looked horrified. He looked sickened. He looked utterly repulsed. And when he caught the priest's bloody wrist in his hand, he ran his thumb over the scar in his palm. He brought it to his mouth. He grazed it with his teeth, like he remembered the taste of his blood from before he'd ever even been a vampire.

Monsignor Chamberlain had said what had happened in the hive was unfortunate but that it must have been God's will. He'd talked to him about faith and trust and piety and dedicating his life to God and so he had, because there'd been nothing else left for him to do. He'd killed every vampire he could find and told himself it was for God but at night, after, he'd known better; six months later, when they'd won the war or at least seemed to, he'd known he'd done it for the man he'd loved. He'd killed for him because there was nothing else he could've done to better serve his memory. Everything they'd ever had was written in blood.

The priest shifted his hips just a fraction and felt Jude's thick cock shift inside him with it. He pushed up Jude's borrowed robes, blood from his wrist rubbing off on his bare chest, and he shifted again. He curled the toes of his boots under for a modicum of leverage and he sat back, he pushed up, he sank back down, he bared his own teeth in a grimace like it hurt because, in part, it did. Jude looked at him like he didn't understand, but he felt the moment Jude's heels braced against the ground and he pushed up anyway, thrust into him, made them both gasp out loud with it. Jude reached for the priest's cock, then he hesitated, so the priest led his hand there, closed it around himself, guided the first few strokes. His hand on him didn't feel different. His cock in him didn't feel different. It was like nothing had changed, but everything had. It was like no time had passed at all, but eight whole years had gone by. 

Jude came in him, gripping his forearm, still stroking his cock. He groaned with it just like he'd used to, low and sharp and breathless, bucking up against him once more, twice, all his muscles straining. The priest came not long after, their eyes right on each other, his face flushed, tensing and tightening and spilling over Jude's bare abdomen, and he paused there, trying to tell himself, Devil's advocate, that maybe he could stay like that, maybe there wasn't a problem at all. But there was. He hadn't meant for this to happen. He hadn't imagined that it would. He hadn't even hoped for it.

He stood. He wiped himself off cursorily. He dressed. Slowly, so did Jude. And when he started to dress the cuts at his wrist, Jude came over to him, he took the cloth and did it for him. He let him. It was unexpected. It made him pause. And he did it well; he took his time, he was thorough.

After, Jude sat himself down on the table, though the aged wood groaned with his weight. He swung his legs underneath it, almost carefree but there was a problem. There was a problem and he wasn't free of care. 

"What will you do with me now?" Jude asked. He'd hoped he wouldn't, and he started to pack away his things just to keep himself looking occupied. 

"I'll leave you here," he replied. "When the storm's over." 

"Do you think any of this changed me so much I won't go back to them?"

"I think the queen changed you, not me," he said, and he put away the oil, the alcohol, the dressing kit. The concentrated on it, moving methodically, so he wouldn't have to meet his eyes.

"And if I go back to her?"

"Then I guess you go back to her." 

"And you kill me?"

"And I kill you. If it's the last thing I do." 

Jude rubbed his eyes. He sighed. "And if I don't go back?" he said. 

The priest looked at him. He didn't mean to but he did it anyway, sharply, frowning, and Jude looked almost expectant with it, like he was trying, like he was making an effort to slice off the parts of what the vampire queen had done inside his head. He wanted to believe that. He wanted to believe that desperately. Perhaps he had to believe in something, to fill the void of everything he'd left behind. Perhaps Jude had had to believe in something, to keep himself alive. Perhaps, perhaps. 

"The queen took everything from you," he said, almost thinking aloud.

"Everything the clergy left me," Jude replied, looking irritated. "It wasn't much." 

"But she still took everything you had." He paused. He went closer, stepped between Jude's parted knees and set his hands down on his thighs. "And I left the church, Jude. All the priests did. Now I do what I do because it's right, not because of a vow." He paused again, frowning, at Jude, at himself, at everything and nothing. "Come with me." 

Jude snorted, derisory, like maybe he was amused by that. "How can I?"

"No one knows it was you. Just me and Hicks and Lucy, and they went back to the outpost." 

Jude looked at him, sceptical, almost incredulous, but that was the truth of it. He hadn't mentioned him. He'd barely spoken at all in the city that day because he'd known Orelas would shout him down, and so he hadn't mentioned him. There was no vampire menace, not even that, so how could there have been a human vampire? He'd have called it nonsense, or blasphemy, or something in that line, so he'd left that part out. He hadn't even told the priestess, and he'd prayed that decision wouldn't come back to haunt him. In a way, it had. 

"Maybe you're a vampire," he said, "but if you're free of the queen, you're still a priest."

"I'll be free when she's dead." 

He leaned up. He kissed him, briefly, on his fanged and bloody mouth. 

"Then we'll kill her," he said.

It seemed like as good a plan as any. It was a plan, at least.

\---

They left in the morning, when the storm had finally blown out. They went up the stairs and walked out through the sand in silence; the priest jogged down the sandbank and Jude followed with him, close behind. When they came to his bike, they blasted out the engine vents and they put on goggles and settled into the seat. Jude put his hands at the priest's waist, over his cloak. He rested his forehead against his back. 

"Thomas," the priest said, glancing back over his shoulder, and Jude frowned at him for a second, then he smiled, almost smirked, almost like his old self. 

"Do you doubt, Thomas?" he said. 

"I think we have the same doubts," the priest replied, with a wry twist to his mouth. "But I hope God will guide us."

Jude nodded. He hadn't had a name for eighteen years, but he had one now. And he had hope, even if he hoped in vain. All that he could do was pray it wasn't.

The priest started the engine; it would be a long ride. 

God had never answered his prayers. But right then, as they rode away together, he thought perhaps that _was_ his answer.


End file.
